I think this might be my favorite game I’ve played this jam, honestly. Extremely polished, creative puzzle mechanics, and a solid difficulty progression. The bonus puzzle was a nice twist on the concept, and I liked the little passcode puzzle leading up to it, too (very clever solution…!). Really well done.
For a few (small) criticisms:
- Sometimes there felt like there were slightly too many tutorial levels in each section, and only one or two real “puzzles”. Now, these tutorial levels were still generally good, and mostly not tedious, but I think sometimes it felt they weren’t teaching anything so important that it needed its own separate level. That may be somewhat up to opinion, though.
- Very occasionally, when a bunch of puzzle elements were placed very close together, things could get a little visually cluttered and take me slightly longer to mentally parse.
- I think the speed up button could speed things up even more. If I’m pressing it, odds are I’m at least 90% confident I have a correct solution, so it can be a bit annoying to have to wait a while holding it before moving on to the next level. This was most noticeable on the bonus level, for obvious reasons.
- I like that the game is split up into several discrete sections… but honestly? While playing, I almost completely forgot about that, because the game does not tell you when you’ve finished one section and moved onto the next. They just bleed into each other. I might add some kind of splash screen to let you know you’ve finished the current set of levels, before sending you back to the menu.
- There’s no progression tracker in the game right now, so if you exit to the menu at any point (as I did, closer to the end, once I realized I’d probably already gone through several sets of levels and wanted to see how far in I was), you have to just kind of guess what level you were on before you exited. You can also skip to any level at any time right now, which is perhaps not ideal. Given this game has a single, clear, linear progression, the levels should probably unlock as you go.
- Returning to the menu should return you to the level select screen, not the title screen, I think. This was only really an issue when I was working on figuring out the passcode, because that required I hop repeatedly between levels. The decently long fade transition to enter the level select screen didn’t help, there.
Those are minor issues, though. Overall, I really enjoyed my time with this. With the level of polish this already has, I think it’d actually be a pretty viable commercial release, given a bunch more levels and a few more mechanics. You’ve got something really promising here!